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Ultrafine particles, in particular solid sub-100 nm particles pose high risks to human health due to their high lung deposition efficiency, translocation to all organs including the brain and their harmful chemical composition; due to dense traffic, the population in urban environments is exposed to high concentrations of those toxic air contaminants, despite these facts, they are still widely neglected. Therefore, the EU-Commission set up a program for clean and competitive solutions for different problem areas which are regarded to be hotspots of such particles. HORIZON AeroSolfd is an EU project, co-funded by Switzerland that will deliver affordable, adaptable, and sustainable retrofit solutions to reduce exhaust tailpipe emissions from petrol engines, brake emissions and pollution in semi-closed environments.

The integration of DeNOx functionality into wall flow filters for the after treatment of diesel engine exhaust gases is a field of technology to which many publications in the recent years have drawn their attention. To integrate the needed amount of catalyst, high porous substrate materials have been developed. A drawback of the high porosity levels of 60% and higher is a significant reduction in mechanical strength. The aim of this work is to provide a new solution based on a high porous SiC material which is treated by a dual layer coating. The first layer is a nanoparticle coating which enhances the mechanical strength of the substrate. It can also be used to improve the catalytic performance and to finally decrease the loading of the second coating layer which is the active catalyst for selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx with ammonia.

This text is divided into two parts; the first part gives a short recapitulation of the development status of the electrochemical reactor for soot removal, while the second part gives a description of activities on electrochemical NOx reduction. The Electrochemical Reactor for filtration and continuous combustion of soot from diesel exhaust gas has been described earlier [1, 2]. The reactor size has been increased by stacking flat plate reactors, and full size test has been performed on a diesel engine in a test bench. The soot removal efficiency is better than 90%, but the efficiency for gas oxidation (conversion of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbons (CH)) is still low, of the order of 50%. The packing and mounting of the reactor is under development to avoid mechanical breakage by engine vibrations. This has improved the durability significantly, and on road vehicle test is under initiation.